The positions of cells in the ABM [1]} are in the form of \((x,y)\) -coordinates in \(\mu \) m, while the positions of cells in the CA [2]} are described using lattice indices. We frame the output of both models as coordinates by using that Owen et al. [2]} assume their xanthophore and iridophore grid squares are 20 \(\mu \) m wide, and their \(M\)  grid squares are 40 \(\mu \) m wide (e.g., we map the indices \((i,j)\)  of a melanophore to \((x,y)\) -coordinates \((40i, 40j)\) ). At this stage, all of the ABM [1]} patterns are on domains of size \(3.71\)  mm long and \(2.215\)  mm high. The domains associated with CA [2]} patterns are all within one grid step of \(6.93\)  mm in length, and they vary from \(1.56\)  to \(3.08\)  mm in height (in our 1000 simulations), since growth is uncoupled in the horizontal and vertical directions. To account for the difference in domain length between the models, we crop CA patterns, only considering the cells in a region of length \(3.71\)  mm in the center of the domain. Following the approach in [6]}, we remove the cells that fall within the top 10% or bottom 10% of the domain height for both the ABM and CA data, since stripes are often messy and not fully formed in those regions.
